The rumble of the Enterprise’s engines and the bleeps of its computers help bring the bridge to life. In this version only Picard’s ready room is accessible, but more areas of the ship are being added.
The Oculus Rift indie scene is fast becoming the best way to assess the potential of this new hardware. Artists, coders, and game designers – ranging from industry veterans and passionate hobbyists – are using tools like Unity and Unreal Engine to create fascinating VR experiences in their spare time, and one of the most interesting uses of the tech is allowing people to visit famous locations from film and television. These spaces, once 2D images viewed passively on a screen, can now be explored in three dimensions.
Nick Pittom, a freelance animator and filmmaker, has recreated scenes from two of the most popular films by Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. His Spirited Away demo is set in the boiler room of the film’s otherworldly bath house, and is vividly detailed and animated. “The geometry of the room is surprisingly inconsistent,” says Pittom of its creation. “When you try to analyse the dimensions of the room and where everything fits, you realise that the film doesn’t really keep consistent between shots. So the challenge was figuring out how to make it a 3D space while staying true to the film.”
Pittom’s most recent work is a recreation of the famous bus stop scene from the film My Neighbour Totoro. In it, the titular Totoro – an inquisitive forest spirit and one of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki’s most beloved characters – plays with an umbrella in a rain storm. In both experiences, the sensation of seeing a space you know so well from a film in 3D is striking. You’re able to move around with traditional first-person controls, and looking up at the towering Totoro gives you a sense of its size and presence that the film, as beautifully drawn as it is, never could. “The possibilities for immersive storytelling, exploration, unique experiences is what excites me about the Oculus Rift,” says Pittom. “I think there’s a massive untapped seam of potential here that we’re only just getting glimpses of.”
Totoro’s animation, which beautifully mirrors that of the film, was rigged in Maya, then imported into the Unity engine. Pittom’s next project is a scene from the anime series Cowboy Bebop.
A very different, but just as powerful, demo is Jerry’s Place, which recreates the apartment set from hit ‘90s sitcom Seinfeld. The show ran for 180 episodes, and the image of comedian Jerry Seinfeld in his fictional New York apartment became a defining image of television in the 1990s. As such, seeing it rendered in VR is a surreal experience. “We’re so used to the camera angles you see on TV,” says creator Greg Miller. “So I thought it would be awesome to see the place from Jerry’s point of view. I started by using Google images to find pictures of the set, but the options were limited. Eventually I had to resort to screen-grabbing episodes to get detailed shots of the seldom seen parts of the set. In some cases it was easier just to research the objects using retail or eBay photos.”
Some of the most memorable Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes used the Enterprise’s holodeck to explore the possibilities, and pitfalls, of virtual reality. So it’s appropriate that Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi series is the subject of a number of Rift demos. The most impressive is TNG Engineering by Drash, creator of popular VR demo Titans of Space. Built in Unity, it presents a stunningly realistic-looking, and dimensionally accurate, recreation of the USS Enterprise-D’s engineering deck, complete with humming warp core. Filmmaker Enda O’Connor has also created explorable versions of the bridges of both the TNG Enterprise and the ship from the original series, and VR developer Thomas Kadlec used Unreal 4 to build the bridge of the USS Voyager.
A more contemporary example is design studio Framestore’s recreation of The Wall from HBO and George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. This colossal 700-foot wall of ice divides the fictional continent of Westeros and protects the Seven Kingdoms from the mythical horrors lurking in the frozen north. The studio describes VR as “a thrilling new method of storytelling that actually puts you inside a TV show and changes the course of how a narrative experience can be delivered.” The demo, which sees you riding Castle Black’s rickety elevator to the top of The Wall, was exhibited at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Maisie Williams and Kristian Nairn, who play Arya Stark and Hodor in the series respectively, were among the many people to experience it. And Framestore will continue to push its tech further to achieve “near-photoreal CGI” in its VR demos – “We’ve hardly scratched the surface of where linear and non-linear storytelling can go next,” says the studio.
To enhance the realism of the ride to the top of The Wall, the booths at SXSW were fitted with fans to simulate wind and a shaking elevator. The creators describe it as a ‘4D’ experience.
It’s remarkable that people are creating demos like this using only the most basic version of the Oculus Rift development kit. The new version, the DK2, is being shipped out to early adopters in August, and its HD resolution screen and vastly improved head tracking means these experiences will only get more immersive in the coming months.
If the Rift is the game-changing breakthrough Facebook and Oculus want it to be, these virtual TV and film sets could become an important factor in its acceptance by a mainstream, non-gaming audience. If hobbyist developers are making experiences as impressive as these just for the fun of it, you can only imagine what a large studio with a generous budget and access to original set designs and blueprints from production companies could achieve.
The post How Oculus Rift is helping fans to recreate and explore their favourite fictional environments appeared first on Edge Online.
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